Aug 6 1985

From The Space Library

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Current revision

Arthur Smith, 74, retired chairman of United Technologies Corp. and the originator of the concept for water injection in piston engines that made major contributions to the performance of World War II combat planes, died August 6 after a long illness, the Washington Times reported.

Smith retired as chairman of United Technologies-then known as United Aircraft-in 1973. He had assumed the post 15 months earlier after serving as executive vice president, president, and chairman of the executive committee.

In 1935, after two years in the automotive industry, Smith joined Pratt & Whitney as an experimental test engineer. As a project engineer, he and a coworker invented and patented a system for water injection to control detonation and increase horsepower in aircraft piston engines. The 1938 invention increased the speed of U.S. fighter planes used during World War II by 40 mph.

In 1949 he became chief engineer at Pratt & Whitney and helped develop the J57, which powered the F-100 fighter, the first production aircraft to exceed the speed of sound in level flight. Smith became president of the company in 1967. (W Times, Aug 8/85, 7B)

Sometime in 1986 or shortly thereafter a Conestoga rocket might launch a capsule carrying the cremated remains of 15,000 human beings into an orbit 1,900 miles above the earth, Malcom Brown wrote in the NY Times, and a few critics had deplored the idea that the U.S.'s first private venture into space should haul so seemingly useless a payload. However, Browne pointed out, the day might come when the space undertakers would orbit human relics of genuine value to future historians, archeologists, scientists, and doctors.

As the living world became more crowded, he wrote, cremation seemed increasingly attractive as a space-saving alternative. However, if the trend continued, scientists in the distant future might encounter a troublesome shortage of human remains representing today's society. Space burial of at least a few representatives of our society would serve future science admirably, he wrote. Safe from grave robbers, souvenir hunters, land developers, and other terrestrial menaces, an orbiting body would remain in the most pristine frozen storage imaginable.

Short of orbiting whole bodies, he added, even the storing of samples of human tissue in space would give future scientists useful time capsules. A system patented by a U.S. inventor, Philip Backman, reduced a human body to 5% of its natural weight by freezing, pulverizing, and vacuum drying it. “A few grams of the resulting powder, taking up no more space in an orbiting mausoleum than cremated remains, would bequeath to future scientists important clues about the deceased person's identity, genetic makeup, pathology, and even style of life,” he wrote.

“Space may be the arena of our future wars. It seems fitting that space should also serve as a graveyard, from which our distant descendants could mine the treasure of knowledge,” Browne concluded. (NYT, Aug 6/85, C3)

The orbiter Challenger on Space Shuttle mission 51-F landed at 12:46 p.m. PDT today on Edwards Air Force Base's Mojave Desert lake-bed runway, the Washington Post reported. During the flight, Challenger circled the earth 127 times, a distance of a little over three million miles.

Technicians stood by at the runway to remove immediately the heat sensors from Challenger's main engines to check a NASA theory that the sensors caused the premature shutdown of the center rocket engine during the July 29 launch. NASA was confident enough that the sensors would be found at fault that it had equipped Discovery's engines with redesigned sensors before moving it August 5 to the launch pad.

During the mission, Challenger became an orbiting astronomical observatory with more than $72 million of telescopes and other instruments to study the sun, stars, and distant galaxies. The NY Times reported that Dr. Burton Edelson, NASA associate administrator, said, “We met more than 80 percent of all science objectives of this mission. We're absolutely delighted.” Dr. Eugene Urban, chief mission scientist, added, “Everyone has collected tantalizing new data. It's going to take a long time before this data is analyzed and really fully appreciated. We've made some interesting new observations, and some have been very spectacular.” Jesse Moore, NASA associate administrator, commented that the orbiter appeared to be in good shape after the landing, the eighth for the Challenger. “It was a beautiful landing,” he said. “The tiles looked very good. The brakes look excellent. The orbiters continue to be magnificent flying machines.” (W Post, Aug 7/85, A3; NYT, Aug 7/85, Al)

When the Space Shuttle Challenger on mission 51-F landed today, it successfully concluded the third mission of the European-developed space laboratory, Spacelab 2, which NASA used for the first time in its pallet-only configuration, NASA reported. All Spacelab subsystems but one provided excellent data, and NASA verified for the first time two new Spacelab systems, the “Igloo” and the instrument pointing system.

NASA would fly many of the Spacelab 2 instruments on future missions, so the 51-F mission provided opportunities not only for scientific data collection but also for engineering checkouts of the new equipment. Since instruments are brought home, engineers could evaluate and refurbish them to improve their performance or modify them to meet different scientific objectives in response to results from prior flights.

Through Spacelab 2's four ultraviolet and visible light instruments, researchers observed a sun that, although it was in a fairly quiet phase of its activity cycle, displayed sunspots, filaments, granules, spicules, and prominences. These solar features changed over periods as brief as five to ten minutes and from orbit to orbit, day to day.

The solar ultraviolet universal polarimeter (SOUP) started its program late in the mission after an unexplained shutdown and startup. Thereafter, the instrument performed almost perfectly, observing the strength, structure, and evolution of magnetic fields in the solar atmosphere. Scientists were confident that despite abbreviated operations SOUP data would be the best and longest run of solar granulation data ever collected.

Although loss of altitude and propellant during initial Space Shuttle ascent jeopardized part of the plasma depletion experiment, planners managed to schedule four of the eight anticipated burns, two over Millstone Hill, Massachusetts, and one each over Arecibo, Puerto Rico, and Hobart, Australia. Preliminary data indicated that the burns did produce “holes” or troughs of depleted plasma that persisted in the ionosphere for more than an hour. The crew observed resultant airglow after the nighttime burns, and there were reports of visual observations from the ground. The Hobart site reported the reception of low-frequency cosmic radio emissions through the window the burn temporarily opened.

In the properties of superfluid helium in zero-gravity experiment, the cryostat performed up to expectation, maintaining a temperature low enough to keep the helium in the superfluid state. Temperature was readily controlled, and the cryostat recovered well from temperature increases. These findings were important to the use of superfluid helium as a cryogen on future missions.

During the gravity influenced lignification in plants experiment, pine seedlings, oats, and bean sprouts grew in self-contained growth chambers. The crew daily monitored chamber temperatures and photographed the chambers early and late in the mission. The oat and bean seeds germinated in orbit, and sprouts grew to a height of five to six inches as expected. The pine seedlings also showed normal growth. Researchers would analyze the plant tissues to determine whether there was any difference in the production rate of lignin between plants grown in space and in a control group grown in a ground laboratory. (NASA Prelim Spacelab Mission Science Report, Aug 6/ 85; ESA release Aug 7/85)

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